To avoid purchasing a replacement SAN, I would like to utilise local storage with Veeam Backup & Replication. We currently have two hosts and already have a B&R license that I am testing. I would like to keep the ability to vMotion or migrate VMs between hosts with local storage without disruption. Reading the documentation, it seems B&R can perform a 'Planned failover' but this will shutdown the VM and hence require an outage.

Is it possible that Veeam can leverage vMotion to perform this to provide a live migration to a replica?

Alternatively, I can use built-in storage vMotion to replicate for scheduled maintanence but this is not ideal either. If I performed a vMotion to our other host, which I plan to keep replica's, I believe I would have two copies of the VM. I would not want to delete the replica because I would loose backup snapshots. The migration would also take a lot longer than Veeam.

I've got 6.0 Essentials plus so I'm not licensed. That's fine, I can upgrade but this is not the same thing. If I was replicating host A VMs to host B with Veeam and then needed to take host A offline I could migrate with this enhanced vMotion but I would then have two copies of the VM on host B. Also, it world take a long time the copy the data.
What I am saying is that it would be awesome if the migration could be aware of already replicated data.

Duncan, 'planned faliover' is somewhat different from you're looking for. It is made for planned maintenance ﻿procedures and testing DR live. For your case, I believe, Veeam Quick Migration would be a fit. It doesn't require vMotion license and can be 'hot' or 'cold'.

Andrew, it looks like Quick Migration will not take into account that I have (hypothetically) have already replicated the VM to the host B. So once again, Veeam will replicate another copy. Is this correct?

We currently have a SAN. It's a single point of failure so I'd like to get rid of it. We recently bought Veeam and will be using it for backups regardless.

I think you misunderstood my last question.

Here is my hypothetical scenario using only local storage:
I have host A and host B. Host A has VM1. Veeam B&R has a 'replication' job which is replicating VM1 from host A to host B in case host fails.

My question is, can I migrate VM1 to host B without shutting it down (like 'vMotion' or 'Live Migration') while leveraging the existing replica of the VM which is already on host B. This would cut down the migration time as the data is theoretically already replicated.

Duncan, sorry, got confused by a mix of questions about replication and VM migration, which are different things.

Let's tackle them one by one.

1) Migration. Terms 'vMotion' and 'Mirgration' go to this part.

﻿With Veeam you can perform "Quick Migration", as my reference above. It can be cold or hot. It can be done even without vMotion license but still has some requirements to check in advance.

2) Replication

Yes, you can utilize "Veeam Backup & Replication" to perform VM replication from host to host (or﻿ vCenter to vCenter). Veeam replication doesn't require you to shut original VM down at any point of time. It goes as following: Veeam sends a command to create a snapshot of a VM, then copies data of the VM to remote site and once this is done, consolidates VM snapshot. Users/applications, worked with VM, don't notice any VM outage.

Duncan, you're welcome. Can you please try to describe your case once again, as I'm pretty sure we have a feature for that need. It's just a bit of misunderstanding between us here, so we can't make a plan for you:)

In short, the 'planned failover' feature would do it if only it could be performed with the VM running.
This would mean:
No disruption during migration for scheduled maintenance
Short migration time for locally stored VMs
Simple to fail back